Voices in Christian Formation: Scot McKnight

BY Doug Jones

September 27, 2012

Voices in Christian Formationis a series of posts to help introduce some of the contemporary authors and speakers we can learn from as it pertains to our Christian formation. The posts focus on critical components of our Christian formation and provide a short bibliography to investigate each topic further.

Scot McKnight is a leading voice in the theological world as it pertains to the life of Christ, the New Testament and the early church. He is a professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary, a prolific blogger at Jesus Creed and the author of more than twenty books. As someone who has followed Dr. McKnight since being a seminary student in his class, I have noticed a theme emerging in much of his writing: Christian formation according to Jesus.

This theme is evident in his book Jesus Creed and also in the title I would like to highlight, One.Life. I recommend One.Life as a dynamic resource to walk through with your youth staff, and as a source to develop a series for young people in revealing a deeper, vital and practical discipleship.

McKnight writes, “I want to sketch in One.Life how Jesus understood what we call ‘the Christian life.’ If we were to ask Jesus our question – What is a Christian? – what would he say?” (p. 17)

Throughout One.Life, Scot takes a sweeping look at our everyday lives—our relationships, vocation, sexuality, church, justice and more—all through the lens of Jesus’s call to follow him. The book is a challenge to move beyond piety built on rules and faith built on intellectual assent to engage our whole lives to the radical and immense vision of Jesus’s call for us to join together in seeing “God’s dream for the world come true” (p. 28).

Have you given thought to what Christian formation would look like through the eyes of Jesus?

Does it raise your pulse to think about working with others to see “God’s dream for the world come true”?